Greg Lockhart

Greg Lockhart is a Vietnam veteran and an historian. Formerly of ANU, he has produced five books and many essays. His memoir Weaving of Worlds: a Day on Île d’Yeu, is just published.

Greg's recent articles

20,000 members of the American Nazi Party once rallied in Madison Square Garden. Could it happen again?

20,000 members of the American Nazi Party once rallied in Madison Square Garden. Could it happen again?

On October 10, The Atlantic premiered 'A Night at the Garden', an unsettling seven minutes and five seconds long video made of film footage that American documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry had accidentally found.

From imperial romance to practical security history

From imperial romance to practical security history

At the levels of public ritual and private observance, the ANZAC narrative is much about processing loss and assuaging grief. But let us recall here its nature as an imperial romance, and what that might mean for our place in the multi-polarity of the current world order?

The VVV Vietnam Veterans' Vigil, 3 August 2023

The VVV Vietnam Veterans' Vigil, 3 August 2023

The 3 August Vietnam Veterans' Vigil (VVV) is separate from the 18 August government-sponsored Commemorative Service on Vietnam Veterans' Day.

AUKUS and the security pathology of colonial racism

AUKUS and the security pathology of colonial racism

Today, there are strong arguments that Australian security and defence thinking, which was historically race based, is now culturally embedded; that the current situation is close to what race theory describes as 'racism without racists.' How, then, might Australian colonial racism have conditioned our security culture to put the 'A' in the AUKUS nuclear powered submarine (SSN) deal?

AUKUS this ANZAC Day

AUKUS this ANZAC Day

'I'm proud of what we did in less than 24 hours.' That was Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's 4 March comment this year on the time he took back in 2021 to decide on supporting the then Liberal government's startling AUKUS agreement.

Anglicans, ANZAC and the nation

Anglicans, ANZAC and the nation

There has been a change in the way we understand the ANZAC tradition.Since 1945, the literature on ANZAC has led us to think of its 'classical' and 'stoic' sources as a 'secular' national religion. Darren Mitchell's important Sydney University PhD Thesis 'Anzac Rituals' (2020) more reasonably demonstrates its British imperial religious ethos.

The khaki election this ANZAC Day

The khaki election this ANZAC Day

The khaki does not primarily represent the defence of Australia. It still represents something close to what Lord Salisbury intended it would be in the first khaki election of 1900: the defence of the empire.

Casting Lockheed Martin out of the Australian War Memorial

Casting Lockheed Martin out of the Australian War Memorial

The Medical Association for the Prevention of War is appealing to the Australian War Memorial not to renew its partnership with weapons giant Lockheed Martin when the current agreement expires in April this year.

The fall of Kabul: false friends for over sixty four years

The fall of Kabul: false friends for over sixty four years

On hearing of the fall of Kabul a few days ago on 15 August, I recalled how shocked I had been by the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. As an Australian soldier who served in the Vietnam War between September 1972 and March 1973, I was an adviser to the old Army of the Republic of Vietnam and commanded the Australian Embassy Guard in Saigon. Since 1975, Ive also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the nature and outcome of the Vietnam War. So it is that, as the fall of Kabul has come to...

Reinventing ANZAC Day away from its imperial origins

Attendance at ANZAC DAY dawn services plummeted by 70% between 2015 and 2019, and questions have been asked about the Days fading relevance. We need to re-invent ANZAC Day as a day of restitution for the appalling losses of an imperial expeditionary tradition that bears no relationship to the defense of Australia and its dignity as an independent nation.

Not knowing ones enemy: fundamental intelligence failures in Australia's Afghanistan and Vietnam

There are disturbing parallels between what occurred in Afghanistan and what occurred 50 years earlier in Vietnam. The accidental killing of innocents is one link. So, too, is the intelligence vacuum into which our expeditionary military tradition sucked us in both countries.

Heart of Darkness: Our expeditionary imperial culture and alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere

We tend to forget that our military, political and other cultures were formed in the frontier wars of British imperial expansion in the 19th century. Because those wars were fought in the process of taking the land of Aboriginal and Maori peoples and of inflicting partial genocide en passant, they were always going to produce serious historical amnesia. Silence.

The importance of the Brereton report on our alleged war crimes in Afghanistan

On 20 November, the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) General Angus Campbell finally presented the public with the redacted version of NSW Justice Major General Paul Breretons report into our alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

PR Spin on Our Alleged War Crimes and 'Rogue SAS Squad' in Afghanistan

Senior members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) have been drip feeding us through the media with information about the alleged war crimes committed by the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) and other Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

'Poor moral leadership' and our alleged war crimes

Australias SAS must be accountable for possible war crimes in Afghanistan, says Professor Philip Dwyer (P &I 27.7.20). Indeed, it must. We must emphasise also that individual soldiers have responsibility for their actions. And that we, our government and nation, are responsible too.

Anzac and the Great Deception in Australasian History

This year, Anzac Day marches have been suspended for the first time in almost a century. Because of the coronavirus the Australian War Memorial (AWM) will broadcast a socially distanced Dawn Service. The New Zealand National Memorials will represent their Dawn and Citizens Services on media and on-line. At State Memorials in Australia, Governors will privately lay wreaths around the national myth. In both nations, the streets will be eerily emptied; the borders closed.

GREG LOCKHART.- Quarantined in the Jazz Age

A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if Id seen it. I hadnt.

David Walker's Stranded Nation

Professor David Walkers Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation.

What we forget on Anzac Day

On the first Anzac Day, 25 April 1915, the Australian Imperial and New Zealand Expeditionary Forces landed at Gallipoli. On Anzac Day 2019, Anzac forces are again in the Middle East and Afghanistan this time 16 years after their initial deployments at the beginning of the Iraq War.

GREG LOCKHART. On the back of the great crime against humanity in Iraq.

It was a bloody mess. So said one Iraq veteran heavily involved on the logistics side of things and quoted in Dr Albert Palazzos recently declassified studies The Australian Army and the War in Iraq 2002-2010 (572 pages, 2011) and Deploy, Sustain, Return: Australian Logistics and the War in Iraq (156 pages, 2008). But note well that therein the term bloody was meant metaphorically. In Australias Iraq, there was very little fighting.

GREG LOCKHART. On reading Peter Stanleys review of Peter Cochranes Best We Forget.

Ive just caught up with Peter Stanleys review of Peter Cochranes Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914-18, which was posted on Pearls and Irritations on 15 November 2018. I mention this, because it provoked a response that I think deserves underlining: John Mordikes 15 November reply, which pointed out that a main thrust of Stanleys review is wrong. Coming to terms with this thrust will then lead me into a discrete criticism of Cochranes book.

GREG LOCKHART. Armistice and Remembrance Day in Australia

The signing of the armistice at 11 am on 11/11/1918 did not raise great enthusiasm among members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), because their first thought was for sleep. It then took a year for the battlefield silence to spread across the Empire.

GREG LOCKHART: Tearing down our heroes.

The Director of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), Dr Brendan Nelson, has inappropriately used his position to criticise Fairfax Media over its reporting of allegations that former Special Air Service (SAS) Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC has committed war crimes. The Director says the allegations are an attempt to tear down our heroes and that unless there have been the most egregious breaches of the laws of armed conflict, we should leave it all alone. On recent reports of a domestic violence incident involving Roberts-Smith, the Director says they constituted one of the lowest blows I have ever seen.

GREG LOCKHART: Remembering the charge at Beersheba and forgetting the Balfour Declaration

This week, as our $600 million Great War centenary rolled on, the Australian Light Horse charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917 has come out of the culture in a tsunami of centenary excitement at home and abroad. Media enthusiasm for the charge has been unbounded in Australia, while talks in Tel Aviv between the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on defence cooperation in industry, intelligence and cyber-strategy lent a business-like touch to proceedings. At the same time, 2,000 descendants of light horsemen, many aged and wearing period costume, gathered near the Commonwealth...

GREG LOCKHART. An old imperial reflex

Rawdon Dalrymples 4 August blog A personal link to World War One presents us with an automatic defence of the old imperial order.

GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 5 of 5)

Part 5: Narrative Overview and Conclusion The emphasis in our military history and remembrance on asking how we fought does not inherently preclude an interest in what we were fighting for. The two narratives could co-exist and interact. But not effectively in our culture yet. We still lose sight of what our remembrance confirms: the interconnectedness of what we were and still are fighting for.

GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 4 of 5)

Part 4. A race strategy to save White Australia Political manipulation of the societys racially inflected anxieties was a major factor in the imperial ascendency over national defence policy in the Commonwealth in 1911. The secret implementation of a race strategy then determined our entry into the Great War. This information was not available to Australians until 1992.

GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 3 of 5)

Part 3. Empire over nation. In 1914-18, the fight for Empire against Asia minimised independent Australian national interests. Ambiguous, interchangeable use of the terms empire and nation also protected that imperial bias in our political culture.

GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 2 of 5)

Part 2. Empire against Asia The imperial nature of Australias involvement in the Great War was distinctively Australian and, it should be said, a sign of the doubt white settler society had about its survival as a remote outpost of the British Empire in Austral-Asia.

What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? Part 1 of 5-part series.

To find out what we were fighting for in the Great War we must get past the usual fig-leaf explanation, which is as remarkably effective as it is short on cover in Australian culture.

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